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Tag Archives: Goldman Sachs

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, December 1, 2016:

Coat of Arms of Saudi Arabia

The global price of crude oil jumped more than 11 percent since OPEC announced on Wednesday its first agreement to limit production by the cartel since 2008. There are many moving parts to the agreement — perhaps too many.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 30, 2016:

One of the first criticisms over Donald Trump’s nomination of former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday for Treasury secretary came from the Democratic National Committee: “So much for draining the swamp … nominating Steven Mnuchin to be Treasury Secretary is a slap in the face to voters who hoped [Trump] would shake up Washington.”

Just the name “Goldman Sachs” sends shivers down the backs of Americanists.

The standoff between law-enforcement officials and environmentalists determined to stall completion of the Dakota Access crude oil pipeline (shown) turned violent late Sunday night. About 400 protesters set two trucks on fire near Cannon Ball, South Dakota (which sits on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation), and when sheriff’s deputies moved in to quell the accelerating riot they were met with a rain of rocks and flaming logs. At least one officer was struck on the head.

All the mainstream media could do was point out that law enforcement used high-pressure water from fire trucks to push back the crowd, along with firing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades. Little was said in the MSM that the crowd had been given multiple orders to disperse as they were trespassing on private land and causing damage.

According to Rob Keller, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department, “Protesters were given multiple orders to back up. But these agitators were a little more aggressive and did not back down, and that’s why there was [this] force used.” Keller added:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, November 16, 2016:

The Mutt and Jeff comic strip began in 1907 and lasted until 1983, with Al Smith drawing them for nearly 50 years. The slapstick comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy played to audiences from 1927 to 1950 while Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made seven “Road” films starting in 1940 and ending with “the Road to Hong Kong” in 1962. An eighth “Road” film was planned in 1977, “The Road to the Fountain of Youth,” but it was canceled when Crosby died of a heart attack that year.

Question: how long is the “co-equal” partnership of Reince Preibus and Steve Bannon likely to last?

Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that he was naming Reince Priebus as his chief of staff and Steve Bannon (shown) as his chief political advisor generated outrage from the Left and the Right. While the Right accused Trump of selling out his principles by installing longtime Republican stalwart Reince Priebus as his personal gatekeeper, most of the Left’s outrage was focused on Bannon, who has made it his life’s mission to oppose and expose the establishment’s control of the media and the political process in general.

Those who know him, however, have a vastly different and more favorable view of the man.

Running Breitbart News ever since its founder, Andrew Breitbart, died in 2012, Bannon has tapped into, and augmented, an increasing number of citizens’ distaste of and outrage against the establishment. More than 40 million people view his website every month,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 14, 2016:

Upon learning that Donald Trump named the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Reince (pronounced “rains”) Priebus to be his chief of staff, Michael Savage called him “the enemy within.” Savage, the host of a popular talk show with 20 million listeners nationwide, added:

He’s the RNC! Everything the voters rejected. He will steer Trump away from every policy we sent him to D.C. to change. He is the enemy within. He is [Paul] Ryan, [Mitch] McConnell, and the Old Guard. They do not want change.

Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, agreed, although in slightly softer terms:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, November 11, 2016:

Nervous conservatives are looking for signs that the “establishment” – i.e., Goldman Sachs, big banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, George Soros, etc. – having been unable to derail Donald Trump’s march to the presidency, is going instead to infiltrate and insinuate its operatives into the new Trump administration. Many of them remember the successful infiltration and subsequent manipulation of the Reagan administration with the naming of establishment insider James Baker as Reagan’s chief of staff.

At the moment there appear to be four “wild cards” out of the dozens Trump has already invited into his inner circle: Steven Mnuchin, Peter Navarro, John Paulson, and Carter Page.

The first and most obvious one is Steven Mnuchin, the head of Dune Capital Management and former director at Goldman Sachs, where he amassed a personal fortune estimated at more than $40 million as head of the firm’s trading desk. A graduate of Yale,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, November 10, 2016:

In March, Donald Trump trotted out an early list of foreign-policy advisors on whom he would be relying if he were elected president. In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump said, “I can give you some of the names … Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives Caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos — he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joseph Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more.”

In August he added “quite a few more” and then, the day after he was elected, Trump added still more, this time in the economic policy area.

There are at least four “wild cards” in the deck that Trump is building,

Midday last Thursday, the price of crude oil for delivery in December touched $50, and it’s been all downhill since then. At noon on Wednesday crude oil futures touched $45 a barrel on news that inventories soared last week by the most in 34 years.

The market wasn’t expecting that. It was bad enough that the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported a supply increase nine times greater than analysts and observers were expecting last week. Those market seers were betting on an increase of a million barrels. Instead the API reported the increase was 9.3 million — a miss of gigantic proportions.

On Wednesday, however, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that the API’s estimate was far too low:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 7, 2016:

Jon Corzine

Five years ago this summer, former New Jersey Governer Jon Corzine’s high-risk futures and options trading company, MF Global, began having liquidity problems, thanks to risky trades that he had made with company money. When those trades began going sour the firm’s lenders starting issuing margin calls. When he couldn’t meet them, instead of admitting he’d erred by liquidating the failed trades and taking his losses, he simply called up the company’s treasurer and ordered her to raid customers’ accounts to meet the demands.

It’s one thing to risk one’s own money. It’s another thing entirely to push that risk onto unsuspecting and uninformed customers. Even worse, it’s wrong to lie that he never intended to do it.

Now Corzine will pay a small fine and move on.

The details of the final days of MF Global were spelled out by the New York Times last Thursday:

On Tuesday evening Donald Trump announced the addition of Stephen Bannon to his campaign and the promotion of Kellyanne Conway (above)to a position on his staff, explaining, “I want to win. That’s why I’m bringing on fantastic people who know how to win and love to win.”

To the consternation of traders short the market, crude has jumped from $30 a barrel in late January to over $40 currently, with many indicators pointing to still higher prices. Was $30 the bottom? What will be the new ceiling?

Every bull market rises from the ashes of fear, disgust and despair. Traders and investors reasonably expected oil to bottom at well below $30, perhaps in the 20s, with some heavyweights, including Goldman Sachs, suggesting even lower prices. Some took short positions, certain that their calculus was correct: OPEC had maxxed out, American production seemed impervious to precipitous declines in rig counts, China’s economy was faltering and signs of recession were continuing to expose themselves around the globe, including the U.S. What could go wrong?

A little energy company, Callon Petroleum, showed exactly what could go wrong. Three times in the last six months the company has sold new shares to raise equity, and three times the company’s stock has risen. Logic and experience would suggest that dilution of shares would reduce their price. But with Callon, shares jumped from $4.21 in the middle of January to nearly $10 currently.

The price of crude oil, which reached $65 a barrel a year ago, fell below $30 in January with expectations that its decline wouldn’t end until it hit $20, or even lower. But hopeful optimists see light at the end of the tunnel — this coming from next Sunday’s OPEC meeting in Doha, Qatar (photo above) — where an agreement to freeze production at current levels will be on the table, bid crude higher in an almost straight line. On Tuesday NYMEX crude hit $42 a barrel, a 40-percent jump from January’s lows.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, March 28, 2016:

English: Aerial view of Rio de Janeiro city center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The latest numbers coming out of Brazil confirm what Goldman Sachs said last December: “What started as a recession … is now mutating into an outright economic depression, given the deep contraction of domestic demand.”

Translation: President Dilma Rousseff’s attempt to stimulate the slowing economy via massive insertions of new debt has in fact had the opposite result.

Consumers have cut back by more than eight percent across the board, while investment spending has declined more than 10 percent last year, with cumulative capital spending

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, March 28, 2016:

John Maynard Keynes

Boiled down to its most crude elements, Keynesianism, according to Antony Mueller at the Mises Institute, is “the economic policy doctrine of growth by spending.” Since 2003, when the current political party in Brazil, first headed up by Lula and now by Dilma Rousseff, came to power, it installed it in spades. For a while it seemed to work: demand for Brazil’s raw materials: oil, iron ore, and agricultural products grew as China (also pursuing the “growth by spending” mantra) also grew.

But the boom, which at one point included Brazil as one of the BRIC (Russia, India, and China) nations that would soon overtake the developed world, went bust.

With crude oil up more than 30 percent over the last week, and companies like SeaDrill and Chesapeake Energy up 125 percent and 250 percent, respectively, over the last five days, short covering has persuaded some that the bottom is in. Investors, especially short sellers, in the oil patch need lots of risk capital, a high risk tolerance, and a short memory.

News of Aubrey McClendon’s death in a fiery car crash on Tuesday morning in Oklahoma City staggered those who knew him. Chesapeake Energy, founded by McClendon and a partner in 1989, said “Chesapeake is deeply saddened by the news that we have heard today, and our thoughts and prayers are with the McClendon family during this difficult time.” His new company, American Energy Partners, founded the day after he was fired from Chesapeake in 2013, offered this:

Aubrey McClendon, the co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, died Tuesday morning in a fiery car crash when his Chevy Tahoe hit a concrete highway bridge support “at a high rate of speed,” according to a spokesman for the Oklahoma City policy department. The spokesman added: “The vehicle was immediately engulfed in flames. It appears that speed was most definitely a factor in the fatality.”

Many expressed publicly their condolences but none more eloquently than T. Boone Pickens, a friend of McClendon’s for 25 years: